‘Well’—she held her belly like it was the funniest thing in the world—‘if you’re planning to solve whatever the hell is happening up here, I hope you’ve read a bit more widely than Sherlock Holmes, because even Arthur Conan Doyle believed in ghosts.’

CHAPTER 18

Before I talk to my older brother in the Drying Room, there are a few things you should know about my younger brother. The first is that his name is Jeremy. The second is that I’m not one hundred per cent confident in my use of tense here: his name still is Jeremy, but it also was Jeremy. I guess both are right. Please don’t mistake my lack of grammatical aptitude for dishonesty. The third is that when he died, I was sitting next to him.

This is difficult to write, and not just because of the cast on my hand.

We never call Jeremy anything but his first name. It’s a thing, I’ve noticed, when someone dies young. Like they haven’t lived into the legacy of their surname. Sofia might not think so, that it’s not what’s in your blood or on your birth certificate that matters, but she still cares which way the names go around the hyphen. It’s why you can go from Ernest, as you practise the rigid capital E over and over in bright crayon; to Cunners, on the second-grade football team; to Mr Cunningham, speaking into the snake’s head of a courtroom microphone; to ‘Ernest James Cunningham’ printed inside a wreath, on a pamphlet handed out in the archway of a church. Because you get your name back when you die – all of it. I’ve noticed that too. That’s legacy. It’s why Jeremy never made it past Jeremy.

I’m not saying he’s not a Cunningham, because he is, in the truest, deepest sense of the word. But to call him Jeremy Cunningham, I think, makes him smaller than he is, tethering him to us. As a Cunningham, he is part of those dreams that wake me dry-tongued, gagging. Without our surname to anchor him, he is part of the sky, the wind, the mind.

Names are important in crime novels, too, I reckon. I’ve read many a denouement in which the detective picks apart an alias, revealing a hidden meaning (for example, Rebus means puzzle, if you didn’t know) or perhaps a baffling anagram behind the name. Mystery novels love an anagram. While most of the names in this book are real, I’ve altered some for legal reasons and others just for fun, so if you laid out the names of everyone in here and tried some deductions, you may well spoil some surprises. I don’t mind if you want to do it that way. My name is Ernest, I am truthful: there is no hidden meaning there.